Sunday, April 30, 2017

A sober friend said recently
that he tried to quit drinking for years, but if he was being
honest, he wasn't trying that hard. This struck me as significant.

A lot of us tried for years, or
are still trying, and think we were/are trying hard. Were we? Are we? It sure
feels like it when you're struggling to stay sober and keep backsliding and
drinking.

Another friend, who has been
struggling to quit for years, and is still struggling, told me that a
woman at AA told her she didn't really want to be sober or she would be. At the
time, that comment struck me as incredibly, horribly, unforgivably mean. I
still think it's mean. But underneath the meanness, something significant
lurks.

A few people in my online group
recently have commented with impressive honesty about how they are not really
sure they want to stop drinking. I've been thinking about that for the past few
days, and my friend's comment about in truth not trying all that hard made
all the thoughts come together.

Between the time I first had
the thought "I drink too much" and the time I quit for good, I didn't
really want to stop. What I wanted was to be a social drinker. I wanted to be
able to moderate. I wanted to be able to go out and have drinks with everyone
else and feel like an ordinary person and not someone who had this label. I
wanted to come home after a hard days work and pour a glass of wine or three
and numb my feelings. I wanted to run a hot bath and soak in it while drinking
a glass of wine and chilling out. I did not want to go to 12 step meetings and
be preached at. I did not want to drink club soda when everyone else was
drinking wine and either make up some bullshit excuse about why I wasn't or
tell people I had a problem. I did not want to be The Other.

I wanted to stop having hangovers
and making an ass of myself, but I did not want to stop drinking. I wanted –
and this is one of the three things that Buddhists say cause pain – things to
be other than as they were. I wanted to be the kind of person who had two
glasses of wine and no consequences. I didn't want to stop drinking. I wanted
to be that person again.

At some point, something
shifted. I turned a corner. I wanted the madness to end more than I wanted to
be able to have a long hot soak in the bath with a ginormous glass of Pinot in
my hand.

Wanting to do the work of
recovery came later. And it was only after I did the work, and received the
gift of having done it, that I started really wanting to be sober instead of
wanting to be able to drink moderately.

So no. At the beginning. I
didn't really want stop drinking. I was angry that I had to stop drinking.
Resentful that I didn't get to drink anymore. It was doing the work of recovery
that allowed me to transcend that resentment, to be grateful for sobriety and
recovery.

At some point, I stopped
fighting against the resentment that I couldn't be a moderate drinker. At some
point I became willing to try something new and see what happened.

Became willing. That's Step 2.
Almost everyone here has done Step 1, admitting that their lives have become
unmanageable. But Step 2? That's a hard one. Becoming WILLING to believe that a
power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

For me, that power wasn't God.
I've had issues with the higher power thing. For me, that power was the program
itself. I saw my father and all these other people living happy, fulfilling
lives in sobriety after following the program, and I became willing to try and
see if it would work for me, too.

Monday, April 24, 2017

I
wrote a post not long ago that referred to my first year of sobriety as feeling
as though I was crawling out of my skin. The more I think about it, the more
apt that phrase seems. I really did feel as though I could not just sit with
all my chaotic feelings about the awful things that were happening.

In
retrospect, a lot of the awful things that happened were precisely because I
couldn’t sit still with my feelings, because I couldn’t just realize that
sometimes bad things happen, and sometimes people are assholes, and sometimes I
make costly and embarrassing mistakes.

Bad
things still happen. People are still sometimes assholes. And, unfortunately, I
still make costly and embarrassing mistakes. But the feelings around all that
are different. I no longer feel as though the whole world is against me, that
I’m standing in the face of a storm that won’t stop buffeting me long enough
for me to catch my breath.

When
I make an expensive mistake or a social faux pas or lose my shit with my kids,
I remind myself that everybody does stuff like this. I’m not the worst, most
pathetic person who ever lived. I am just a person in the world, like everybody
else.

When
I was drinking and newly sober, I cycled between feeling intense shame because
I was The World Person in the World, and righteous indignation because other
people didn’t treat me like I was as perfect as I wanted to be and in moments
of grandiosity convinced myself I was.

Shame
and grandiosity. Self-hatred and narcissism. These are the poles between which
we swing when we’re drinking. When we stop drinking and take those first shaky
steps on the road to recovery, those poles are all we know. We know nothing of
the bland flyover country of the soul, where we are just as valuable – and just
as flawed – as every other person. We don’t know how to acknowledge our
mistakes without self-flagellation, clean up the mess as best we can, and move
on. We don’t know how to forgive other people because they’re only human and
doing the best they can, even when they hurt us.

Life
is so much better now than when I was drinking. I still have problems. I still
get angry. I still get embarrassed. But the problems are not catastrophes, the
anger isn’t rage, and the embarrassment isn’t soul-killing shame.

None of this would have happened
if I hadn’t developed a drinking problem and then got sober. When I was new in
AA and people would introduce themselves as “a grateful alcoholic” I was like,
WTF? Now, I get it. I’m grateful that drinking too much broke me open, and
sobriety put me back together, better than before.

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

A friend recently celebrated a year sober.
In her "I have a year!" post in our online community, she credited
something I wrote there during her first dark days, when she was struggling to
string more than a few sober days together, with helping her turn the corner.
It was my "I have have two years!" post, where I wrote this:

Today I am 2 years sober. Life
is still hard, but it is immeasurably better than it was when I was drinking. I
was high functioning, had a job, kept up appearances, but my off switch was
unreliable. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't, and when it didn't, I
would wake up hung over, ashamed, hating myself. I love not waking up feeling
that way now, not ever. Not once in two years.

There are a lot of people in
this group who are struggling in early sobriety, or not even in sobriety yet,
still drinking but wanting to be sober, or thinking they want it in the
mornings but not wanting it by the time 5 o'clock rolls around. I've been
there. The first time I wrote in my journal, "I think I drink too
much," was not my Day 1. It was quite a few months before that, maybe more
than a year. I can't remember now. But from the time I first wrote those words,
the pleasure of drinking was eclipsed by the shame of drinking too much.

More than 2,000 years ago,
Aristotle wrote, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not
an act, but a habit." What I do repeatedly now is get up, don't drink, go
to bed, repeat. The more sober time you have, the easier that gets.

Modern research confirms that
willpower can be exhausted, that it's hard to decide to do something and force
yourself to stick with your decision, but if doing something becomes habitual,
it becomes easier. You don't have to decide, each and every time, that you will
do it. Brushing your teeth every morning and night isn't burdensome because
it's a habit you've had for decades. You don't think about it, say,
"Should I do it today?" You just do it, without thought, without
exerting willpower and feeling the consequent depletion of willpower.

That's why continuous sobriety
is the key to sobriety. When people get annoyed about having to reset their
sobriety date when they only drank once, and think, I shouldn't lose my 50 days
or whatever, it's not about slapping you down and saying your 50 days don't
count. It's not about counting or keeping track at all. It's about habit
formation -- the habit of not drinking, not because you have to decide not to
drink, but because you don't drink, just like you do brush your teeth. When you
have a few weeks of sobriety then drink, then stop for a few weeks then drink,
then stop, then drink, you're deciding every single day whether you will or
won't, and deciding is the exhausting part. Every day that you don't drink, the
habit of not drinking gets stronger. That's why people count days. Not to brag,
"I have such and such many days/months/years" but because the longer
you go without drinking, the stronger the habit of not drinking becomes, until
you don't have to decide every day, will I drink or won't I? Because you just
don't drink, and you don't have to decide and deplete your willpower by
deciding.

There is no magic number when you stop having to decide and not drinking
becomes a habit. I have no idea when it happened for me. I just know that it
did, and I'm so grateful.

A few days after my friend's one year post, another member of our online
community wrote this:

Sorry for the bad news, but I
still say that if you are treating this as a battle of willpower then you are
eventually going to lose. If you really want this, then winning 1000 battles of
will and then losing only 1 is not going to meet your goal. If you believe me,
then the challenge isn't for us to avoid having a drink, it's to work on our
brain so we don't want to drink. This is going to involve doing a lot of shit
you don't want to do, and maybe don't believe in, not giving a shit about what
your spouse or significant other thinks, rolling with some serious fears about
what the future holds for your relationship and your life, ignoring a bunch of
shit other people do or say, and ignoring a bunch of shit that your brain and
ego is going to tell you along the way - the same brain and ego that got us
here in the first place.

He's right. Absolutely, 100%
right. While texting with a sober friend yesterday, it hit me that the reason
so many in our little community are struggling so much is that they haven't
done what this guy (who has been sober five years, and is a different person
from the raw, newly sober guy who wrote this
post was) and I have done: work on our brains, doing a lot of shit we
didn't want to do, and maybe didn't believe in.

A lot of members of our online
community are pretty anti-AA, but for me, AA was a life saver. Not because I
couldn't string together sober days (I was 5 months sober before I got
sponsor and started working the Steps) but because doing those Steps
totally flipped the the script on my victim narrative, see my own part in
things, take responsibility, and stop being resentful and wallowing in
self-pity.

I had problems with the higher
power thing, so for me, my higher power was the program itself, all these people sitting there sober 20, 30, 50 years,
living proof that the 12 steps can keep you sober.

Step 2, coming to believe that
a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity, was believing that if I
did what these people did, it could restore me to sanity. And that belief,
that willingness to believe, is missing in so many people in our online community. They see
all of us with two or three or five years of sobriety saying, it gets better,
it really, really, really does, but they are not willing to believe that it could
possibly be true for them.

I have posted in that community before about one of my favorite books, Stumbling on Happiness, by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. The title makes it sound like one of those self-help books, but it's actual science. What Gilbert's research shows is that human beings are incredibly shitty about predicting what the future is going to be like, and that asking someone currently having the experience you are imagining (like being sober a long time) gives a more accurate view of it than imagining it yourself.

I have read so many posts in that community from people who aren't sure if they want to be sober. Do I
really want to give it up forever? Am I being too hard on myself? Can I face a
life without it? Many of us – perhaps most of us, certainly I –
have danced that dance in our heads before. What strikes me now as I look back
on that time in my life is that I was speculating about something – long-term
sobriety – that I had no personal knowledge of. I imagined a life without
drinking, when drinking was all I knew.

What I was capable of imagining was only what I
knew already of not drinking – the white-knuckling early days, when it felt
like deprivation. Of course it did. Giving it up was brand-new. What I was
incapable of imagining was a life where I didn't think about it much at all. A
life that was good and full and satisfying without wine in it.

Instead of continuing to debate
should-I-shouldn't-I?, I suggest a data-driven investigation into drinking and
sobriety. Try a
year without wine. You don't have to think about a life without alcohol
forever and ever and scary ever. Just a year. Try it. After a year, if you
think sobriety is grim and awful and sucks beyond imagining and we are all full
of shit, then by all means, drink up. You won't have to wonder anymore whether
sobriety is worth it. You'll have done the research, and you'll know.

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About Me

This is an anonymous blog, and my profile is a work in progress. I am not sure how much I will share here eventually, but for now I am keeping it general. I am a woman, a mother, a writer. I write anonymously so that I can write freely about things I would not feel comfortable sharing on a blog under my own name. But I do want to share, because reading about other people's true experiences helps me on my own journey.
Names of my children and friends have been changed, but everything on this blog is true and honest, to the extent that I can make it so. We are all dishonest with ourselves at times, and unintentionally dissemble, but any dissembling here will be of the unintentional variety, not the intentional.